"Google's Chrome and Android operating systems will remain separate products but could have more overlap, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said, a week after the two came under a single boss." That's that, then.

I think Google are more likely to kill it off if ChromeOS did start supporting Android:
* Developers wouldn't bother to write web apps tailored for ChromeOS if they they could just target Android
* There's be no point Google maintaining two OSs if they both just run Android Apps.

From a business point of view, what will Android bring to Google in 1 or 2 years when most major smartphone and tablets vendors (Samsung, Amazon, ZTE, Huawei) will put their own services on their devices instead of Google services?

And what is the point for Google to keep improving Android to help Samsung compete against Google's own Motorola division?

On the other hand, Chrome OS may become a nice mobile proprietary OS for Google hardware.

Running Android apps isn't important in the long term. HTML5 is getting heavily invested to reach parity with modern APIs. Pretty soon, people be able to differ between regular native apps and web apps.

People who follow the adventures of ChromeOS and Chromebook will see where Google is going.

Running Android apps isn't important in the long term. HTML5 is getting heavily invested to reach parity with modern APIs. Pretty soon, people be able to differ between regular native apps and web apps.

With the recent announcement of the demise of Google Reader, I think people have a vested interest in wanting to run local/offline apps. Who wants to run apps that can be yanked by the developer at any given time? I don't. This is a conversation we're not having about web apps being the future, but really should be.

Of course, some apps, such as Facebook or Google Voice, could never really be run entirely offline, but those are not the ones I'm talking about.

Running Android apps isn't important in the long term. HTML5 is getting heavily invested to reach parity with modern APIs. Pretty soon, people be able to differ between regular native apps and web apps.

This isn't going to happen. HTML5 proponents have only harmed HTML's long term adoption by pushing HTML5 on shops too early. The recoil from this will cause developers to be wary of HTML for years for app development.